The IT services companies have been grabbing headlines for recruiting the most number of people in the last year. However, there are hidden gems in other sectors too. Fintech, edtech, agritech, logitech, and D2C (direct-to-consumer) or FEALD — an acronym created by Bengaluru-based specialist staffing firm, Xpheno — are sectors that don’t make it to the headlines but do their work under the radar.
Consider this in-house data collated by Xpheno: FEALD attracted 560 deals with a disclosed value of $19 billion In 2021. Currently, year-to-date (YTD), three-fourths of that number of deal counts and 50 per cent in deal value have already been clocked.
As the Covid pandemic is waning, the economic development in the last year has boosted the growth of FEALD companies. This in turn required lots of people and a huge number of indirect jobs were created where start-ups had to scale up. The collective potential of FEALD to provide direct and indirect employment is for an 8 million workforce by 2025, says Xpheno’s co-founder Kamal Karanth.
“We all knew that the tech talent was having a FEALD day throughout the last year or so as large IT Services and Global Captive Centres (GCC) companies scaled up their engineering talent. This was also the time when over 1,100 start-ups got funded across different industries. But the largest concentration of these funding were in the FEALD sectors,” he says.
The direct and indirect employment in the FEALD sectors is a fascinating story. Most of these start-ups are touted as tech start-ups and VCs like tech start-ups for their non-linearity and efficient scale-ups. However, for every job, these sectors directly create almost three times indirect employment.
Charm on FEALD
The continued investor confidence on FEALD is evident from the YTD investments trend. With over 120 ‘seeds’ already in for 2022, FEALD has nearly seen a ‘seed’ venture every working day of the year. With 36 Unicorns, the FEALD is already dominating the Indian Unicorns list and with twice that number of ‘Soonicorns’ in the making, the charm of FEALD is here to stay.
The fact that over 8,000-plus enterprises are in operation across FEALD and many of them are creating highly visible brands adds to the charm and desirability of the sector. The attraction for talent to join and be part of the FEALD is evident from the headcount growth registered by the cohort over Covid years.
FEALD value
The FEALD presents a collective potential to be $2 trillion in value by 2025. While this is nearly a doubling of their current value, with a CAGR upward of over 30 per cent, the projections are clear and seemingly possible to hit the $2 trillion mark.
With a current estimated workforce of over 8.5 lakh people in employment, the indirect employment potential is nearly 25 lakh..The near doubling of the value of the cohort is well set to generate employment for more than 2.5X the current workforce engaged, explains Karanth.
Champion sectors
Ramesh Venkat from Logistics Skill Council says, the top champion sectors that are thriving post-pandemic are agri, logistics, eCommerce, IT, health, pharma and electric vehicles. These have never mellowed down even during peak pandemic. Tech is deeply pivoted for growth in these sectors and pretty much synonymous. Therefore, PE investments flowing into these is but the new normal that accounts for a third of the pie.
While we talk about the logitech sector, in the past year, we have seen an increase of 5-10 per cent in new job opportunities. More than new hiring, there has been more circulation of resources within the sector, says Prasad Sreeram, Co-founder and CEO, COGOS, an AI-led logistics platform.
“Logistics has not only proved itself as a backbone to the economy but also as a necessity. We see extraordinary changes everyday be it related to technology and man-power,” he adds.
Speaking about inTech, Prem Kumar Barthasarathy, Managing Partner, Pontaq, a UK-based innovation fund with a lot of focus on Indian FinTech companies, said the sector being a regulated line of business, RBI rightly is taking cautious steps to ensure the interest of consumers are protected. The legitimate FinTechs, Banks, and NBFCs will grow while those FinTechs bordering on the wrong side of law will shut shop.
Porus Sabharwal, interning at CodingNinja, says, “My fascination with teaching and learning processes was always there. Ed tech looked like the perfect industry in which I could explore it further. Ed-tech has a big role to play in making India the next superpower and I want to be part of it.”
There is a consistent inflow of working professionals who are willing to upskill and at the same time, various organisations that are open to hiring. Companies have started focusing a lot more on skills while hiring talent, translating into the slow but steady development of a highly-skilled young workforce in the country, says Siddharth Maheshwari, Co-founder, Newton School, an online jobtech platform.